‘An age when Commons offices became bedrooms for sick MPs.’ James Callaghan and Denis Healey in 1976.
Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

We’ve been here before, and it wasn’t fun. People died. As a playwright, I may be prone to dramatic exaggeration – but in this instance, I don’t think so.

A deal with the DUP will be painful for Theresa May, and put peace at risk | Peter Hain

Read more

We thought we were here in 2010, of course, but we weren’t. Not really. That parliament was hung in name only. The five years of the Conservative-Lib Dem alliance were dramatic only in that very little drama happened when it came to marital crises. The majority was large and stable. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act banished the spectre of a snap election. The government survived.

No, the last time we were here, the period frequently invoked with justifiable dread in the hours after that impossible exit poll last Thursday night, is the 1970s: a time when a US president was under threat of impeachment, terrorist attacks haunted British streets, and a referendum on Europe was launched to settle the continental question once and for all. Thank God things change...

The February 1974 election was called (further irony alert) by a Conservative leader before it was necessary, on the premise of shoring up the government against what he perceived to be opposition to his authority – in Ted Heath’s case, the unions. The gamble failed. Harold Wilson’s Labour party took power, 17 seats short of a majority. A second election that year returned it a tiny majority of three (an alliance with the Democratic Unionist party would offer Theresa May, or whoever succeeds her, a slender majority). And this is where history sends its warning down the tracks.

Edward Heath addresses the nation in a party political broadcast on the eve of the general election, 27 February 1974. Photograph: Frank Tewkesbury/Getty Images

It took only a matter of months for that majority to disappear again, and keep falling. And falling. Ideological defections, byelection losses and, yes, deaths. Between 1974 and 79 more than a dozen MPs lost their lives through the physical and mental stress that is part and parcel of being hung. The all-night sittings, the games of sabotage, the turning up to every single vote, knowing every day might be the government’s last. One government whip, Joe Harper, delayed emergency surgery in his determination to never miss a vote, in effect sacrificing his life for the party he loved.

This was an age when Commons offices became bedrooms for sick MPs, where ambulances arrived into parliament so that infirm and sometimes dying MPs could be “nodded through” if they were unable to physically walk through the lobby. On one infamous and somewhat dark occasion, a Labour whip and his Conservative counterpart assessed quite “how strong” the pulse was for the poor member for St Helens, before deciding he was, in fact, just about alive enough for his vote to count. Such craziness is an inevitable byproduct of such crazy times.

This is why, when I was researching for my play This House, which covered that period, one of the remaining survivors described it to me as “the most dramatic parliamentary term in British history”. Well, it looks like they’re making a sequel. And we need to get ready.

This House – review

Read more

So what challenges can May and her whips expect? There are your own individual backbenchers, for a start, who suddenly become more powerful than ever. They know the government needs their vote – their individual loyalty. As in 1974, they may behave at first, passing the Queen’s speech through, but soon the demands will start piling in.

Then there are your alliance partners to keep happy. A “confidence and supply” arrangement would bind the DUP only on votes of no confidence and the budget. On everything else it can deny the government a majority. So the party of 318 must listen to the party of 10.

And then, of course, there are your “friends across the aisle”. In the 70s the Labour whips called these the “odds and sods” – the Liberals and smaller nationalist parties. Deals, even bribes, became par for the course. Another warning from history: it was these nationalist parties, with their own specific agendas, who eventually turned and took the government down. The rope that holds you can also hang you.

That’s why, historically, hung parliaments tend also to be parliaments of “firsts”: 1974-79 saw the government’s budget amended by backbenchers working with the opposition (the Rooker-Wise amendment, for future pub quizzes) – such is their vulnerability.

In 2017, a potential first is a curiosity within the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that creates, in the event of a no-confidence defeat, a 14-day period in which other parties can try to form a government. Could we witness the changeover of a governing party without an election? Unlikely. But then, witness this week the head-scratching over goat parchment drying times and all absurdities suddenly become less implausible.

When I say I think that today it won’t be much fun – though I hope our show was – it’s because right now, at a national crossroads, with the historic challenges we face, what we desperately need is the politics of the possible. And hung parliaments are the politics of paralysis. We thirst for opportunities but we will find only limitations. We crave unity but will meet only division.

In any great drama, at the climactic moment of crisis, what we usually witness is characters – people – becoming either the very best versions of themselves or the very worst. Given the recent rhetoric of “traitors”, “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs”, I expect the latter. I hope I’m wrong. But if the 1970s teach us anything, it’s that this probably won’t be fun. And we should get ready.